[RFC v5 00/11] Speculative page faults

This is a port on kernel 4.12 of the work done by Peter Zijlstra to
handle page fault without holding the mm semaphore [1].
The idea is to try to handle user space page faults without holding the
mmap_sem. This should allow better concurrency for massively threaded
process since the page fault handler will not wait for other threads memory
layout change to be done, assuming that this change is done in another part
of the process's memory space. This type page fault is named speculative
page fault. If the speculative page fault fails because of a concurrency is
detected or because underlying PMD or PTE tables are not yet allocating, it
is failing its processing and a classic page fault is then tried.
The speculative page fault (SPF) has to look for the VMA matching the fault
address without holding the mmap_sem, so the VMA list is now managed using
SRCU allowing lockless walking. The only impact would be the deferred file
derefencing in the case of a file mapping, since the file pointer is
released once the SRCU cleaning is done. This patch relies on the change
done recently by Paul McKenney in SRCU which now runs a callback per CPU
instead of per SRCU structure [1].
The VMA's attributes checked during the speculative page fault processing
have to be protected against parallel changes. This is done by using a per
VMA sequence lock. This sequence lock allows the speculative page fault
handler to fast check for parallel changes in progress and to abort the
speculative page fault in that case.
Once the VMA is found, the speculative page fault handler would check for
the VMA's attributes to verify that the page fault has to be handled
correctly or not. Thus the VMA is protected through a sequence lock which
allows fast detection of concurrent VMA changes. If such a change is
detected, the speculative page fault is aborted and a *classic* page fault
is tried. VMA sequence lockings are added when VMA attributes which are
checked during the page fault are modified.
When the PTE is fetched, the VMA is checked to see if it has been changed,
so once the page table is locked, the VMA is valid, so any other changes
leading to touching this PTE will need to lock the page table, so no
parallel change is possible at this time.
Compared to the Peter's initial work, this series introduces a spin_trylock
when dealing with speculative page fault. This is required to avoid dead
lock when handling a page fault while a TLB invalidate is requested by an
other CPU holding the PTE. Another change due to a lock dependency issue
with mapping->i_mmap_rwsem.
This series builds on top of v4.12-rc5 and is functional on x86 and
PowerPC.
Tests have been made using a large commercial in-memory database on a
PowerPC system with 752 CPUs. The results are very encouraging since the
loading of the 2TB database was faster by 14% with the speculative page
fault.
However tests done using multi-fault [3] or kernbench [4], on smaller
systems didn't show performance improvements, I saw a little degradation but
running the tests again shows that this is in the noise. So nothing
significant enough on the both sides.
Since benchmarks are encouraging and running test suites didn't raise any
issue, I'd like this request for comment series to move to a patch series
soon. So please comment.
------------------
Benchmarks results
Here are the results on a 8 CPUs X86 guest using kernbench on a 4.12-r5
kernel (kernel is build 5 times):
Average Half load -j 4 Run (std deviation):
4.12.0-rc5 4.12.0-rc5-spf
Run (std deviation)
Elapsed Time 48.42 (0.334515) 48.638 (0.344848)
User Time 124.322 (0.964324) 124.478 (0.659902)
System Time 58.008 (0.300865) 58.664 (0.590999)
Percent CPU 376.2 (1.09545) 376.4 (1.51658)
Context Switches 7409.6 (215.18) 11022.8 (281.093)
Sleeps 15255.8 (63.0254) 15250.8 (43.4592)
Average Optimal load -j 8
4.12.0-rc5 4.12.0-rc5-spf
Run (std deviation)
Elapsed Time 24.268 (0.151723) 24.514 (0.143805)
User Time 112.092 (12.9135) 112.04 (13.1257)
System Time 49.03 (9.46999) 49.721 (9.44455)
Percent CPU 476 (105.205) 474.3 (103.209)
Context Switches 10268.7 (3020.16) 14069.2 (3219.98)
Sleeps 15790.8 (568.885) 15829.4 (615.371)
Average Maximal load -j
4.12.0-rc5 4.12.0-rc5-spf
Run (std deviation)
Elapsed Time 25.042 (0.237844) 25.216 (0.201941)
User Time 110.19 (10.7245) 110.312 (10.8245)
System Time 45.9113 (8.86119) 46.48 (8.93778)
Percent CPU 511.533 (99.1376) 510.133 (97.9897)
Context Switches 19521.1 (13759.8) 22354.1 (12400)
Sleeps 15514.7 (609.76) 15521.2 (670.054)
The elapsed time is in the same order, a bit larger in the case of the spf
release, but that seems to be in the error margin.
Here are the kerbench results on a 572 CPUs Power8 system :
Average Half load -j 376
4.12.0-rc5 4.12.0-rc5-spf
Run (std deviation)
Elapsed Time 3.384 (0.0680441) 3.344 (0.0634823)
User Time 203.998 (8.41125) 193.476 (8.23406)
System Time 13.064 (0.624444) 12.028 (0.495954)
Percent CPU 6407 (285.422) 6136.2 (198.173)
Context Switches 7319.2 (517.785) 8960 (221.735)
Sleeps 24287.8 (861.132) 22902.4 (728.475)
Average Optimal load -j 752
4.12.0-rc5 4.12.0-rc5-spf
Run (std deviation)
Elapsed Time 3.414 (0.136858) 3.432 (0.0506952)
User Time 200.985 (8.71172) 197.747 (8.9511)
System Time 12.903 (0.638262) 12.472 (0.684865)
Percent CPU 6287.9 (322.208) 6194.8 (192.116)
Context Switches 7173.5 (479.038) 9355.7 (712.3)
Sleeps 24241.6 (1003.66) 22867.5 (1242.49)
Average Maximal load -j
4.12.0-rc5 4.12.0-rc5-spf
Run (std deviation)
Elapsed Time 3.422 (0.0791833) 3.312 (0.109864)
User Time 202.096 (7.45845) 197.541 (9.42758)
System Time 12.8733 (0.57327) 12.4567 (0.568465)
Percent CPU 6304.87 (278.195) 6234.67 (204.769)
Context Switches 7166 (412.524) 9398.73 (639.917)
Sleeps 24065.6 (1132.3) 22822.8 (1176.71)
Here the elapsed time is a bit shorter using the spf release, but again we
stay in the error margin.
Here are results using multi-fault :
--- x86 8 CPUs
Page faults in 60s
4.12.0-rc5 23,014,776
4.12-0-rc5-spf 23,224,435
--- ppc64le 752 CPUs
Page faults in 60s
4.12.0-rc5 28,087,752
4.12-0-rc5-spf 32,272,610
Results is a bit higher on ppc64le with the SPF patch, but I'm not convince
about this test on Power8 since the page table are managed differently on
this architecture, I'm wondering if we are not hitting the PTE lock.
I run the test multiple times, the number are varying a bit but remain in
the same order.
------------------
Changes since V4:
- merge several patches to reduce the series as requested by Jan Kara
- check any comment warning in the code and remove each of them
- reword some patch description
Changes since V3:
- support for the 5-level paging.
- abort speculative path before entering userfault code
- support for PowerPC architecture
- reorder the patch to fix build test errors.
[1] http://linux-kernel.2935.n7.nabble.com/RFC-PATCH-0-6-Another-go-at-speculative-page-faults-tt965642.html#none
[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=da915ad5cf25b5f5d358dd3670c3378d8ae8c03e
[3] https://lkml.org/lkml/2010/1/6/28
[4] http://ck.kolivas.org/apps/kernbench/kernbench-0.50/
Laurent Dufour (5):
mm: Introduce pte_spinlock for FAULT_FLAG_SPECULATIVE
mm: fix lock dependency against mapping->i_mmap_rwsem
mm: Protect VMA modifications using VMA sequence count
mm: Try spin lock in speculative path
powerpc/mm: Add speculative page fault
Peter Zijlstra (6):
mm: Dont assume page-table invariance during faults
mm: Prepare for FAULT_FLAG_SPECULATIVE
mm: VMA sequence count
mm: RCU free VMAs
mm: Provide speculative fault infrastructure
x86/mm: Add speculative pagefault handling
arch/powerpc/mm/fault.c | 25 ++++-
arch/x86/mm/fault.c | 14 +++
fs/proc/task_mmu.c | 2 +
include/linux/mm.h | 4 +
include/linux/mm_types.h | 3 +
kernel/fork.c | 1 +
mm/init-mm.c | 1 +
mm/internal.h | 20 ++++
mm/madvise.c | 4 +
mm/memory.c | 286 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--------
mm/mempolicy.c | 10 +-
mm/mlock.c | 9 +-
mm/mmap.c | 123 +++++++++++++++-----
mm/mprotect.c | 2 +
mm/mremap.c | 7 ++
15 files changed, 430 insertions(+), 81 deletions(-)
--
2.7.4